Druids

Our attempt on Aran tonight highlighted one very sore point. We don't have enough healers in the guild as too many classes that can heal are specced out to dps or something else. To try and ease this problem I'd like all druids to post their talent build and current gear here so I can get you organized if any of you ever want to come raiding - theres a distinct lack of druids in the raid group and I'd like to sort that. We're a very cable class and should be integrated into the raid often. If you don't have your talent build posted up in a day or so I'll be sending you in game mail as a reminder. Thanks.

Restoration Druid:

You must be in at least Moonglade Raiment with decent healing trinkets, wrist etc or comparable gear. Minimum spirit required is at least 300 unbuffed, minimum intellect is 370 unbuffed and minimum healing is 900 unbuffed. The only two specs I will consider if you want to heal is full restoration or DS-NS even though full resto is preferable for raiding. Any points in feral combat are considered wasted in my opinion if you are hoping to raid heal the gear needs to more than compensate.

The roll of a full restoration druid tends to be raiding healing although keeping Rejuvenation and 3 Lifeblooms stacked on the tanks is preferable (and very do-able). If other healers ask for innervate you are welcome to ignore them since the "rule of 5" favours you since you can stack HoTs on the vulnerable target the go into innervate only to break the 5 seconds required once to refresh. This gives more of an innervate and allows you to continue healing. This coupled with a, most likely, higher mana regen, due to spirit means you are very welcome to keep that precious innervate to yourself.

Balance Druid:

I sometimes miss moonkin, boomkin, doomkin, OOMkin just since it can do crazy dps and easily rival most mages. As such I'm happy enough to speak up for a Balance Druid seeking a place in the raid however one requirement (and this is a necessity!) is that any d00mkin is specced to include full subtlety (a talent in the restoration tree) so that your threat is reduced by 30% since with DoTs and also major spell DPS you can keep the aggro down.

Minimum gear would be the "moon" set. Whilst not a true set like Moonglade or Wastewalker it does suit a balance druid very well. I'll post up the parts of this set as soon as possible. A nice and rather cheap to buy staff would be The Deathbringer or you can opt for Bloodfire Great Staff.

The set I was alluding to is as follows:
Moonrage Girdle
Grips of the Lunar Eclipse
Moon-Crown Antlers
And similar items. As per usual I'll update this when I can be arsed.

Another set worth considering (since druid itemization - especially Balance - is horrific) is Mana-Etched Regalia even though it is cloth armour it still has nice + spell damager. If you roll on it and a silly mage, warlock or priest cries about it tell them to go complain to Blizzard about the big nasty boomkin that "stole" their gear because of balance druids having rubbish D3 sets. And then /dance them.

Minimum stats will be added later.

Feral Druid:

Wastewalker Set is a place to start although Tanking Druids will want more +stamina on their items. To be fair I've never really played feral so checking out the brief guides on WoWWiki is your best bet. I can advice for armor but since I see feral as being the weakest of the three classes (in my opinion) I've not really played around with it much. However, if you are a feral and you want to come on raids then you need both a DPS set of gear and a Tanking set of gear and when required you should be able to OT.

My current build is this:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0zZxGGsfbReuioVx0z

Though I'm thinking of swapping it round a little and getting intensity, since i anticipate I'll be popping enrage quite a lot as an off-tank. The points will probably come from Nurturing Instinct (when did my str drop below 200 again?) and primal tenacity.

Current bear stats in full tank gear with mark are
Armour: 22k
HP: 13.3k
Dodge: 29.8%
And crit immune of course

Oh, and kitty stats in kitty gear
AP: ~2050
Crit: 30.5%

And since i'm normally willing to respec to resto, i'l give you those stats too:
Int: ~370
Spi: ~300
+Healing: 1108
Combat Mana Regen: ~125 + Insightful Earthstorm Diamond (Worth about 15MP5 to a resto druid)
Not far off Sha'tar exalted either, so I'll grab that mace when i have the rep and cash, an enchant it, that's about another 150 healing.

So i was reading the forums on the expected changes to drood casters(boomkins and TOL)
What i see so far is a massive boost to your Regen capability...to the point where you will keep up with a pally MP5
However this only affects "ubers" with 300+ int for some reason so i can only suggest you start piling on the smart gear:)
i also noted that many of the boomkins even the mostly blue ones had excessive healing power and although i know ciccone loves bashing mobs with her twigs maybe its time to let the boom have a go?
just my thoughts for the day

Yeah, i completely rejigged my item weightings when I saw the spirit changes planned for 2.4. They appear to roughly double your casting mana regen from spirit in an adequately geared and raid buffed state. I can see a while 3 spirit = 1 mp5 being quite reachable in casting regen terms, and mp5 is twice as expensive. I have a general distaste towards spirit in 2.3, it's an expensive way to get healing and casting mana regen, and you're rarely not casting if you're rolling lifeblooms, so i tend to see stacking spirit as stating for innervate. Now when i collect resto gear though, I do it with 2.4 in mind, and consider it about twice as good as it was (I do the same for +healing though, since mana regen is easier to get now).

And yeah, there's some good stuff in the balance tree for healing. If you take the decent mana cost reduction talents from balance and resto you can get decent mana efficiency and almost as good single target healing as a pala spamming holy light. Its main weakness is the lack of a fast heal which is reliably available

Yeah, I saw this briefly. I just read it as "Sorry for nerfing your trinket bonus on continuous Lifeblooms - have this". I'm looking forward to this change as currently I have 441 Int (soon to rise when I get my T4 and new trousers) and 350 spirit (soon to rise as well) the latter of which I can easily proc to 700 for 15 seconds.

This should be fun ^^

While I've always had a bit of a quixotic indulgence for restokin and NS-DS specs I feel that your missing out on some major improvements to your healing in a raid situation by following this build. Its nice for heroics but the lack of ToL aura breaks it for me. I'll be sticking as a healbot, just one with silly good mana regen.

Patch 2.4 changes for druids:

* Empowered Rejuvenation: This talent now properly affects the final heal from Lifebloom.
- about time. I'm sick of my lifebloom healing for 600 per second on three stacks and final healing for 1200. It'll be nice to have this fixed.
* Gift of Nature: This talent now properly affects the healing from Tranquility.
- Shall be making tranquility even more imba.
* Insect Swarm: Casting lower ranks of this spell is now properly penalized like other healing and damage effects.
- Shame to see this happen however only an idiot would use the cheaper alternatives when the mana cost is already rather low
* Lacerate: This ability now deals additional damage based on the attack power of the Druid.
- Its Feral... collective "meh"
* Lifebloom healing coefficient has been reduced.
- Major boo. Hopefully the increase to mana regen will at least make regrowth a viable option now.
* Mangle (Bear) now properly triggers a 1.5 second global cooldown, increased from 1.0.
- Its Feral >.>
* Many shapeshift form tooltips have been updated to be consistent with each other.
- Yay!
* Natural Perfection: This ability will no longer be triggered by taking critical strikes while sitting. In addition, it is now affected by the Subtlety talent and reduces damage by 2/3/4%, down from 1/3/5%.
- Not a huge killer since this talent shouldn't come into play often in PvE. If it is, the tank has some aggro issues
* Nurturing Instinct increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 10/20% of your Attack Power while in Cat form.
- Nice for feral/resto PvP hybrids
* When a Druid in cat form casts Pounce it will now properly animate.
- >.> <.< >.>

From a feral perspective:

* Empowered Rejuvenation: This talent now properly affects the final heal from Lifebloom.
- Nice to see for my resto brethren (or if i respec again)
* Gift of Nature: This talent now properly affects the healing from Tranquility.
- ditto
* Insect Swarm: Casting lower ranks of this spell is now properly penalized like other healing and damage effects.
- smells of bugfix, never knew about this, though I had the spell as resto, probably wouldn't have changed my usage of it if i had tho
* Lacerate: This ability now deals additional damage based on the attack power of the Druid.
- <sarcash>hooray.</sarcasm> The only time i ever use lacerate for damage is when i'm soloing elites which squash kitties. The damage has has an 80% threat penalty, so it's a next to worthless unless they scale the initial threat too.
* Lifebloom healing coefficient has been reduced.
- Harsh, my guess is they're trying to stop it being used for MT healing, and forcing trees to be raid healers only
* Mangle (Bear) now properly triggers a 1.5 second global cooldown, increased from 1.0.
- Slight threat reduction due to lag/reactions when i'm spamming buttons, but i generally settle into a mangle-lacerate-lacerate-lacerate rhythm which doesn't take the odd GCD into account anyhow, so it's not a biggy
* Many shapeshift form tooltips have been updated to be consistent with each other.
- Cosmetic meh
* Natural Perfection: This ability will no longer be triggered by taking critical strikes while sitting. In addition, it is now affected by the Subtlety talent and reduces damage by 2/3/4%, down from 1/3/5%.
- I was already going to drop this from my old resto build for 2.4, since with spirit going from okay to imba, i couldn't live without living spirit. Smells like an attempt at the gentle arena resto nerfing that the other classes have been baying for.
* Nurturing Instinct increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 10/20% of your Attack Power while in Cat form.
- Finally, it's taken them like a whole minor revision. When they made HotW work on AP and not str in 2.3, Strength went from bing slightly worse than Agility to significantly worse. Nurturing instinct was generally considered to be pretty bad before then, as it stands now I reckon I'm the only druid in the world who sticks by it . This is something like trebling how good it is (ferals stack agility, and it's up to 100% from 50%). That's pretty nice for the occaisional times i heal (Like my sneaky HTs suring repentence on maiden ). Also thoroughly loving the healing received in kitty form. Just to freak out the people who don't know druid mechanics, I was close to 3k attack power last night. Hey, you healers wanna come get a preview of what it's like to have over 2000 +healing?
* When a Druid in cat form casts Pounce it will now properly animate.
- Cosmetic bugfix meh

Oh, and feral/resto hybrid doesn't really exist. The feral druid talent-choice mantra is "Feral is Mangle", and mangle prevents you from reaching even NS

Feral/ resto is really the talent spec of choice for many solo players. Wowwiki has a brief word on it: http://www.wowwiki.com/Druid_builds#Feral_Mend_Spec_.280.2F30.2F31.29

Even though I'm not a fan of it, many people are especially for solo content (Moonglade DM3 is the perfect partner to this spec). But yes, mangle really is feral however for casual play, feral/ resto seems like a good choice.

"I was already going to drop this from my old resto build for 2.4, since with spirit going from okay to imba, i couldn't live without living spirit. Smells like an attempt at the gentle arena resto nerfing that the other classes have been baying for."

Really I think Natural Perfection is over looked for its major bonus -> an increase in crit percent. This is a major help when coupled with other talents that further increase the likely hood of critting with spells like regrowth and swiftmend. I like this talent, and thats purely from a PvE perspective.

SSC/TK standards. What I expect of aspiring resto druids...

Bonus healing: 1600 as a bare minimum, 1700 would make me a happy Ciccone and would prevent any impromptu angry walks to Stormwind.

Mana regen: 500 unbuffed would be lovely. This does require 450+ intellect and spirit and thus unless you are a heroic whore and have the badge gear, this can be rather difficult. As such, aim for 400-450. This along with an innervate weapon (2nd boss from MgT heroic drops a lovely one that I'm pushing for myself or you could even go for the Serpentcrest Life Staff with +spirit enchant) should see you through while firing off some pots.

Intellect: 400 unbuffed is a minimum
Spirit: 400 unbuffed is a minimum

Health: 7,000 unbuffed health really is a minimum for these places. 7.5k preferable if possible. This should be rather easy to obtain with all the new very imba badge gear that is loaded with stamina.

Trinkets: Sustainability trinkets are really nice for places like this (Bangle of Endless Blessings -> stupidly good in 2.4, Lower City Prayer book etc etc). Although they are nice, the trinkets that increase +healing for a certain length of time aren't a massive health to a druid since the power of a lifebloom - your main spell, no NSDS / Restokin for 25 mans - takes the power of the latest refresh. No more rolling ignites.

Pots: I want to see an Elixir of Draenic Wisdom and an Elixir of Healing Power on all the trees in a raid. No excuses on this one. They aren't that expensive, the alchemists can rustle them up easily... so... get drinking.

Reagents: Come to each raid (even kara) with 40 Wild Quillvine and 15 or so Flintweed Seed. Better prepared than realising you cant ress the OT on Gruul.

Ability: A modicum of skill would be appreciated. And time. And care... All plants need that to flourish.

Healing Style: In 25 mans with multiple tanks, full lifebloom stacks on the tanks with the occasional heal to other targets, i.e keeping a rejuv you can swiftmend off on Zyb since he will rip aggro at some point. With only one or two tanks, full hots on the tanks. Leave the raid healing to the priests.. which shouldn't be using renew much. If they are yell at them they should have rolled druid then flaunt your imba HPS.

And at the end of the day. All restos should be imba. We aren't the best raid healing classes for nothing.